To be true to that goal, we can not stand by and be silent when a large portion of Americans face systemic racism and other forms of oppression. That oppression has meant being excluded from civic participation at the ballot box, being called un-American for peaceful protests, and being denied justice for crimes committed against them.

Open States Boundary Data

We provide files that serve as a static API for obtaining simplified GeoJSON describing the boundaries of legislative districts.

If you obtain an Open Civic Data Division ID (e.g. ocd-division/country:us/state:ks/sldl:1 you can convert it to a URL like https://data.openstates.org/boundaries/2018/ocd-division/country:us/state:ks/sldl:1.json.

The URL consists of a few parts:

https://data.openstates.org/boundaries/ - base URL

2018 - division issue year, currently only 2018 supported (divisions do not change most years)

ocd-division/country:us/state:ks/sldl:1 - Open Civic Data Division ID

json - end URL with `.json`

File Format

division_id - Open Civic Data Division ID, same as URL.

year - Issue year for Boundary, same as URL.

centroid - GeoJSON Point representing the centroid of this boundary.

extent - Coordinates for upper-left & lower-right extent of boundary.

shape - Simplified GeoJSON MultiPolygon for display purposes. This data has been simplified (losing some detail to gain speed when drawing/processing) and should be used for display but not intersection/point-in-polygon testing.

metadata - Metadata that was provided by issuer, typically a bit of Census data. No particular guarantee is made about what is here.

Obtaining ocd-division IDs

If you're using Open States data you'll see ocd-division IDs in a few places: